He has given you everything for which you have asked Him. If you tried to number Allah's blessings, you could never count them... (Surah Ibrahim, 34)

God loves kindness when you deal with any matter" (Bukhari and Muslim)

THE TOPIC OF THE DAY

THE ARTS IN THE GOLDEN AGE

HARUN YAHYA

In the Golden Age, the bounty, abundance, wealth, beauty, arts, and improvements will mark every instant of life. People will always meet beauty and, like the moral excellence they display, the places in which they live, as well as their gardens, home decorations, clothes, music, entertainment, artworks, paintings, and conversations, will become more beautiful. Consequently, people will experience all of the beauties that Allah mentions in the Qur'an. In one verse, Allah states that the faithful believers will be given a beautiful life in this world:

What is with you runs out, but what is with Allah goes on forever. Those who were steadfast will be recompensed according to the best of what they did. Anyone who acts rightly, male or female, being a believer, We will give them a good life and recompense them according to the best of what they did. (Surat al-Nahl: 96-97)

We can imagine the daily life, arts, economy, and social life that will exist in the Golden Age, for the Qur'an prescribes an understanding that comprises every instant of life. This understanding is based on doing good works that will find favor in Allah's sight, and adopting the best, most accurate, and rational conduct. This Qur'anic understanding and the wisdom it offers will cause a heretofore unprecedented and superior understanding of arts to flourish.

In our day, the majority of people involved in different branches of the arts consider art as a materialistic profession that will earn them fame and a high standard of living. Most of the time, they make art not for art's sake but for money. Their sense of art is driven by a concern for profit or fame rather than following their own inspiration. For this reason, they undertake no serious effort and feel no need to expand their horizons to produce novel works of art, for they only desire immediate material returns. However, the telling attribute of an artist is his or her ability to think freely and deeply, and thereby produce unique works.

Meanwhile, even if an artist is committed to produce quality works and succeeds in doing so, those responsible for the business part of this undertaking fail to support his or her endeavor, for such works may not be profitable in the prevailing market conditions. In our day, instead of appreciating a work's artistry, meaning, aesthetics, and quality, many art galleries present productions that lack taste, artistry, quality, and meaning.

The Golden Age will eliminate such views, for material concerns that corrupt artistic values will disappear when everyone receives their share from the prevailing abundance and welfare. This free state of mind will allow artists to devote all their attention to displaying their talents in a peaceful atmosphere. People will realize that art is a divine beauty, and finally will give all types of art their due attention. Inspired by the beauties that they see in Allah's creation, artists will produce remarkable works. The Qur'an's values and the wealth of senses that these values bring will generate in people the will to produce ingenious works.

Another reason for this flourishing of the arts will be the abandonment of any tendency to portray hideousness, which is a popular tendency today. The penetration of nihilist and pessimistic beliefs into society, along with the prevalence of materialist philosophy, accounts for this tendency. Hideousness is valued, and productions introduced under the guise of art cause people to drift toward pessimism, tension, and depression. The themes of such art is often death, pain, hate, loneliness, purposelessness, and meaninglessness. This situation is a natural consequence of the chaos and destruction inflicted by unbelief on the human soul. In the End Times, all of these psychological disorders will disappear, and humanity will experience the joy, happiness, and security brought about by the Qur'an's values. This will, in turn, transform the arts into an endeavor that depict beauty rather than hideousness.

Recognizing the subtleties, taking pleasure in them, and presenting them to others in a form that causes delight underlies the essence of the arts. These features owe their existence to the Qur'an's values. In the Qur'an, Allah commands people to examine every thing, ponder over it, and see the divine purposes behind all events. One of the verses by which Allah summons people to ponder is as follows:

Have they not looked at the sky above them: how We structured it and made it beautiful and how there are no fissures in it? And the land: how We stretched it out and cast firmly embedded mountains onto it and caused luxuriant plants of every kind to grow in it, an instruction and a reminder for every devotee turning to Allah. And We sent down blessed water from the sky and made gardens grow by it and grain for harvesting and soaring date-palms with layered spathes. (Surah Qaf: 6-10)

Everything stated in this verse is encountered frequently by people in their daily lives. However, only the believers who strive to see the divine purposes in these things can see the beauty in them. A strawberry's color, a rose's odor, a banana's flawless packaging, the heavens adorned with stars-all of these mean a lot to the faithful. Art is one way to express these beauties and then interpret and incorporate them effectively into our daily lives. Various branches of art, such as painting, music, or decoration, convey the joy inspired by such beauties to the human soul.

In the Golden Age, every living thing and each incident will stir great joy in people's hearts and, accordingly, manifest itself in artworks, city planning, construction, landscaping, and so on. Artists who see the world through the outlook endowed by the Qur'an's teachings will amaze the world with their masterpieces. Their innovative works will be unique and invigorate people's lives.

Would it be possible for blind workers to construct a building as tall as the Empire State Building? Such a feat is out of the question for humankind. However, blind termites, throughout their lives, build nests that are as high as the Empire State Building on a scale proportional to their sizes.

One of the most important characteristics of termites is that they make nests so strong that even humans can demolish them only with difficulty. They build different kinds of nests in accordance with their needs. While some of them build nests that protect them from burning heat, others build nests in order to seek shelter from rain. These nests can be built either beneath or on top of the soil or even inside trees.

When we look inside a termite's nest, we can see its spongy appearance. The nest consists of numerous cells that are about 2.5 cm (1 inch) in width or narrower. These cells are connected to each other by narrow passages through which only termites can pass. The raw material the termites use while making these marvelous buildings consists only of soil, their saliva and excrement. Using such simple materials, some of them make nests so strong that they can only be demolished by using dynamite, and which possess such detailed systems as labyrinths, air circulation passages and canals.

The main miraculous aspect of termites that can build towers like these marvelous nests is that, as mentioned above, they are utterly blind. This is an important point. Termites can see neither the tunnels they make, nor the material and soil they use, nor the cells they construct.

When the works of termites and humans are compared, the marvel at what termites do can be seen even more clearly. So in order to make a better evaluation of the "skyscrapers" which termites build, New York City's Empire State Building in America will make a suitable comparison. The building is 443 meters (1,453 feet) tall. Termites are insects of 1-2 cm (0.4-0.8 inches) height. In spite of their tiny bodies, they build giant nests towering 7 meters (23 feet) high. If termites were as tall as men, their spectacular nests would then be four times higher than the Empire State Building. Termites have been doing an exceptional job that even man cannot achieve, for millions of years-ever since they were created.

These tiny creatures, which cannot see a centimeter in front of them, construct these giant towers based on fine engineering calculations.

The One Who has created termites with all their characteristics is Allah with the marvelous constructions Allah makes termites build, He, the Lord of all the worlds, introduces us to His boundless might and knowledge. As He reveals in the Qur'an:

Allah is the Creator of everything and He is Guardian over everything. (Surat az-Zumar: 62)

Evolutionists assume that the sea invertebrates that appear in the Cambrian stratum somehow evolved into fish in tens of million years. However, there are no transitional links indicating that an evolution occurred between these invertebrates and fish. It should be noted that invertebrates and fish have enormous structural differences. Invertebrates have their hard tissues outside their bodies, whereas fish are vertebrates that have theirs on the inside. Such an enormous "evolution" would have taken billions of steps to be completed and there should be billions of transitional forms displaying them.

Evolutionists have been digging fossil strata for about 140 years looking for these hypothetical forms. They have found millions of invertebrate fossils and millions of fish fossils; yet nobody has ever found even one that is midway between them.

The evolutionary scenario argues that fish evolved from invertebrates then transformed into amphibians. But this scenario also lacks evidence. There is not even a single fossil verifying that a half-fish/half-amphibian creature has ever existed. Robert L. Carroll, an evolutionary palaeontologist and authority on vertebrate palaeontology, is obliged to accept this. He has written in his classic work, Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution, that "The early reptiles were very different from amphibians and their ancestors have not been found yet." In his newer book, Patterns and Processes of Vertebrate Evolution, puslished in 1997, he admits that "The origin of the modern amphibian orders, (and) the transition between early tetrapods" are "still poorly known" along with the origins of many other major groups.

Until about fifty years ago, evolutionists thought that such a creature indeed existed. This fish, called a coelacanth, which was estimated to be 410 million years of age, was put forward as a transitional form with a primitive lung, a developed brain, a digestive and a circulatory system ready to function on land, and even a primitive walking mechanism. These anatomical interpretations were accepted as undisputed truth among scientific circles until the end of the 1930's. The coelacanth was presented as a genuine transitional form that proved the evolutionary transition from water to land.

410-million-year-old Coelacanth fossil. Evolutionists claimed that it was the transitional form representing the transition from water to land. Living examples of this fish have been caught many times since 1938, providing a good example of the extent of the speculations that evolutionists engage in.

However on December 22, 1938, a very interesting discovery was made in the Indian Ocean. A living member of the coelacanth family, previously presented as a transitional form that had become extinct seventy million years ago, was caught! The discovery of a "living" prototype of the coelacanth undoubtedly gave evolutionists a severe shock. The evolutionist paleontologist J.L.B. Smith said that "If I'd met a dinosaur in the street I wouldn't have been more astonished". In the years to come, 200 coelacanths were caught many times in different parts of the world.

Living coelacanths revealed how far the evolutionists could go in making up their imaginary scenarios. Contrary to what had been claimed, coelacanths had neither a primitive lung nor a large brain. The organ that evolutionist researchers had proposed as a primitive lung turned out to be nothing but a lipid pouch. Furthermore, the coelacanth, which was introduced as "a reptile candidate getting prepared to pass from sea to land", was in reality a fish that lived in the depths of the oceans and never approached nearer than 180 metres from the surface.

Now let us summarize why Transition From Water to Land is Impossible

1. Weight-bearing: Sea-dwelling creatures have no problem in bearing their own weight in the sea. However, most land-dwelling creatures consume 40% of their energy just in carrying their bodies around. Creatures making the transition from water to land would at the same time have had to develop new muscular and skeletal systems (!) to meet this energy need, and this could not have come about by chance mutations.

2. Heat Retention: On land, the temperature can change quickly, and fluctuates over a wide range. Land-dwelling creatures possess a physical mechanism that can withstand such great temperature changes. However, in the sea, the temperature changes slowly and within a narrower range. A living organism with a body system regulated according to the constant temperature of the sea would need to acquire a protective system to ensure minimum harm from the temperature changes on land. It is preposterous to claim that fish acquired such a system by random mutations as soon as they stepped onto land.

3. Water: Essential to metabolism, water needs to be used economically due to its relative scarcity on land. For instance, the skin has to be able to permit a certain amount of water loss, while also preventing excessive evaporation. That is why land-dwelling creatures experience thirst, something the sea-dwelling creatures do not do. For this reason, the skin of sea-dwelling animals is not suitable for a nonaquatic habitat.

4. Kidneys: Sea-dwelling organisms discharge waste materials, especially ammonia, by means of their aquatic environment. On land, water has to be used economically. This is why these living beings have a kidney system. Thanks to the kidneys, ammonia is stored by being converted into urea and the minimum amount of water is used during its excretion. In addition, new systems are needed to provide the kidney's functioning. In short, in order for the passage from water to land to have occurred, living things without a kidney would have had to develop a kidney system all at once.

5. Respiratory system: Fish "breathe" by taking in oxygen dissolved in water that they pass through their gills. They canot live more than a few minutes out of water. In order to survive on land, they would have to acquire a perfect lung system all of a sudden.

It is most certainly impossible that all these dramatic physiological changes could have happened in the same organism at the same time, and all by chance.

This website is launched to reveal that any kind of terror and barbarism is against Islam, and Muslims share the sorrows of the victims of terrorism. You may write your own comments and share your thoughts at this web site.

Our aim is to help to define the concept of "international terrorism", which has been in great focus since the brutal terrorist attack against the United States of America on 11 September 2001, a day wickedness which has destroyed the lives of thousands of innocent people. It is true that the world faces a big danger called international terrorism. The executors and supporters of this evil should be brought to justice. But while searching for the ideological source of this phenomenon, it will be a great error to point to Islam. Islam does not encourage any kind of terrorism; in fact, it denounces it. Those who use terrorism in the name of Islam, in fact, have no other faculty except ignorance and hatred. The solution lies in the understanding of the true Islam and the presentation of it with effective models.